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Recently, a comprehensive indigenous public policy was officially signed by the government of Colombia’s Caquetá region. The policy—drafted by seven indigenous groups with technical assistance from ACT—will, for the first time, provide a platform for the indigenous communities to have a say in Caquetá’s future.

In the past several years, the indigenous peoples of the Colombian department of Caquetá have taken enormous steps forward in asserting their rights, creating a representative body and crafting a recently ratified indigenous public policy for the region. ACT guided and assisted the communities through these processes.

The U.S. writer H.L. Mencken famously remarked, “There is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible and wrong.” The question of how to protect the Amazon’s isolated tribes certainly falls under this principle.

Schaufeld’s philosophy on “making an impact” reaches beyond her neighborhood with her involvement with the Amazon Conservation Team (ACT), a nonprofit organization that works to protect the earth’s most diverse terrestrial ecosystem in partnership with the land’s indigenous people. Having visited the rainforest and learning that protecting the culture and way of life of the tribes is imperative to saving the land, Schaufeld recognized the groundbreaking work of the small group and became a board member.

In a speech delivered at the annual meeting of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation in Brazil, Ashley Massey, a researcher from Oxford University, recently explained that certain cultural beliefs are in fact beneficial to the well-being of the natural world, especially when it comes to keeping some forest areas safe from harm.

Four years ago Jeff Skoll arrived via small plane in the depths of the Brazilian Amazon region, just in time for the Waura people’s festival of the pique fruit, where he sipped from a bucket of its bitter, bright-yellow brew.

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